Alabama:
When after many months of careful tending, Sarah Cseke reached a milestone in her graduate student research, she went straight to the office of the busy chairman of the biology department at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Gopi Podila, to share the triumphal moment.
"I knocked on his door with a petri dish full of hairy roots, and he actually came to the door and took the time to look at it," she said. "He was just as happy as I was."
On Friday, the biology department at the university lost Podila, 52, and two other faculty members in a hail of gunfire at an afternoon faculty meeting. A colleague with a Harvard Ph.D., Amy Bishop, is charged with capital murder. Another professor and the department administrator are still in the hospital in critical condition.
The deaths have left a small, close-knit department trying to pick up the pieces without either its leader, Podila, or the person colleagues described as its "glue," Stephanie Monticciolo, 62, the administrator, who doles out hugs and birthday reminders. Monticciolo is in the hospital with a gunshot wound to the head.
The two other people killed were Maria Ragland Davis, 50, and Adriel Johnson, 52, described as professors who spent hours of extra time helping students. And a colleague, Joseph Leahy, 50, a microbiology professor known for his zesty lectures, remained hospitalized with a head wound.
"They will leave a large hole in our department," said Debra Moriarity, a biology professor and the dean of the university's graduate program.
When Podila, a native of India, arrived nine years ago to build the university's biotechnology program, colleagues had to struggle to find him vegetarian meals. He and his wife quickly became well known in Huntsville's Indian community, arranging performances and, together, choreographing traditional Indian dances. He had two teenage daughters.
Podila was described by colleagues as an enthusiastic administrator with experience creating academic programs and a research interest in biofuels and the symbiotic relationship between fungi and trees.
But Podila was also interested in human symbiosis, said Joseph Ng, a fellow professor. "He was always encouraging collaborative efforts," Ng said.
Johnson, who was married to a veterinarian, was from Tuskegee, Ala. He had two sons, one in college and one in high school, with whom he had recently been visiting colleges. His research focused on diabetes. On campus, he was the director of the Louis B. Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation, and he also screened and helped students who wanted to go to medical school.
His desire to make sure minority students succeeded made him a stern but fatherly figure, colleagues said.
Davis, an enthusiastic gardener who was married and had three stepchildren, came to the campus from one of the city's prominent biotechnology companies, Research Genetics, when it closed its Huntsville office in 2002. James Hudson, who started the company, said he had hired her away from Alabama A&M, a historically black college where she was doing postdoctoral research. He said she had wanted to improve agriculture in developing countries by creating plants that could thrive in inferior soil.
In an interview on "Good Morning America" on ABC, Melissa Davis, Davis' stepdaughter, said the family was still recovering from the death of her mother when her father remarried. "We didn't want to open our hearts quickly because we loved our mom so much, and Maria came in with this gentle and kind heart," Davis said. "She just brought this life back."
On Monday, officials in Boston continued to pore over Bishop's past, looking into questions about whether she may have deliberately shot her brother to death in 1986, though she was not charged, and reports that she and her husband were questioned in the attempted mail bombing of a Harvard colleague.
John Polio, the former police chief in Braintree, Mass., who came under criticism for not pursuing charges in the 1986 shooting, said Monday that while he stood by the decision to declare the shooting an accident, he had come to wonder in light of the Huntsville killings and the pipe bomb investigation.
"You put them all together and it does make you doubt just what happened and how it happened," Polio said. "You have to be more than a psychiatrist to figure that one out. I don't think anybody can really get a handle on it. These things happen, and they happen to people we least suspect they could happen to." Also on Monday, Bishop's husband, James Anderson, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that his wife had borrowed the 9 mm handgun found near the shooting site and that she had been to an indoor shooting range in recent weeks. He had previously said the family did not own a gun.